UCLA Pranks USC Ahead Of Rose Bowl, But It May Be A Fake (PHOTO)

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Was last week's UCLA prank on the University of Southern California this week a big lie?

UCLA and USC will square off in the Rose Bowl Stadium on Saturday, and the winner goes to the PAC-12 championship game. With the two campuses being rivals located only 12 miles from each other, it's pretty tempting to make the short trip across town to prank the other school.

[Story continues after the slideshow.]

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15 Of The Most Epic College Pranks

So it's entirely believable that if MIT students could turn a building into a giant tetris game, it wouldn't be hard to UCLA to spell out a big dig against the neighboring college using the lights of a dorm. But the photo making the rounds on internet is raising some suspicion, as the LAist blog notes:

First of all, we're guessing that if UCLA managed to pull off this prank in 2012, we'd be seeing multiple variations of the picture on Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook/whatever, but all we're seeing is the same shot from the same angle. Second, some at UCLA in this Reddit thread note that Sproul Hall is under construction, so this picture doesn't look current.

It's also exactly like a prank from 1977, where David Tilles and Matt Natalizio, both '77 graduates of UCLA, "helped organize an effort to let fans in Pauley Pavilion know what they thought of the visiting basketball team," as the Daily Bruin reported in 2006.

“F*CK ’SC” was spelled in the lights of Sproul Hall, which, if you look at the photo in the slideshow below, is basically the same as what we're seeing shared online this week.

Of course, these schools have a history of pranking each other, including on Twitter, a "dung drop," and painting the rival's statues. We're just not sure about the authenticity of this one.

Check out the photo of UCLA's questionabale prank on USC and some other notable hijinks from over the years in the slideshow below:

The University of Southern California and the University of California-Los Angeles are only about 12 miles apart, so getting to each other's campus for a quick prank isn't a huge hurdle. In 2012, just <a href="http://www.tmz.com/2012/11/14/ucla-usc-rivalry-dorm-light-football/">days before the Rose Bowl, UCLA students rigged</a> the lights in a dorm to spell out "F*CK USC."
But it turned out this may not have actually been real at all, so the big prank <a href="http://laist.com/2012/11/14/sorry_that_ucla_prank_looks_fake.php">may be on the gullible internet sharing the same</a> photo over and over, the LAist noted:
First of all, we're guessing that if UCLA managed to pull off this prank in 2012, we'd be seeing multiple variations of the picture on Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook/whatever, but all we're seeing is the same shot from the same angle. Second, some at UCLA in this Reddit thread note that Sproul Hall is under construction, so this picture doesn't look current.
Finally, we found out that this photo looks exactly like a prank from 1977.
Students camp out to protect their precious statues -- both of which have been targeted in the past. USC's Tommy Trojan was previously hit with both blue paint and manure, while the Bruin Bear has been covered in cardinal and gold paint.